I was recently trying to install Windows 10 on my laptop from a USB drive, and came across an issue, that proved to be quite hard to crack as most of the solutions that were available online did not help me. In this article I will provide a complete description about it, and how to solve it, so maybe other will waste less time with it.

The issue

I bought a new SSD drive (a Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB version), and I wanted to install a brand new Windows 10 on it from a pendrive.

I downloaded the tool from Microsoft that allows creating bootable USB drives or creating ISO files for installing Windows 10. I created a bootable pendrive with it.

I inserted the new SSD drive and the bootable pendrive, and started the installation process.

So fa so good…

I got past the language selection screen, and gave the product key. Then, when I was asked to select which partition I want to install windows on, I got stuck. I mean completely, I couldn’t get past the message saying “Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition”. Like you can see on the picture.

I started to look for help online. I read countless articles, and found a couple of different solutions. For some people, changing the boot order helped, or manually selecting the boot drive when the computer is starting up. But for me, nothing mattered, I kept getting the same message.

The reason

I am unsure about the exact reason of this happening, but it was connected to the fact that I am using a USB drive for installing, and maybe also to the fact that I was using a USB 3.0 drive with a 2.0 socket.

My theory is, that when I was on the partition selection screen, for some reason the Windows installer could not find my SSD drive, so it couldn’t create a partition on it, or select an existing one for installation. I am not sure how this happened, but I found a few other people mentioning that this might have been the reason.

The solution

In short, the solution was to get rid of the USB drive, and use the SSD drive itself as the installation media. For this, what I had to do is to copy the installation files over to the SSD, and start the installer from there, without using the pendrive.

However, without an operating system, this is not really straightforward, so let’s see the steps.

If you are using the node package manager to manage some of the dependencies of your project, you must be familiar with the npm install command that installs the required dependencies locally for the current directory.

I came across an issue, when this command did nothing despite the fact that my package.json was correct, and I also had npm set up on my computer correctly. I am sure about this, because I have recently used it in other projects where there wasn’t any issues with it.

But in this case, when I issued the npm install command, it just silently failed and did not produce any error messages. I checked my directory and really nothing happened, because the node_modules directory was still nowhere to be found.

The reason for this issue was that my command line window was not opened with administrator privileges by selecting the Run as administrator option in the context menu. After opening the command line with administrator privileges, the issue had been solved.

This happened to me on a Windows 7 machine. I realize that similar symptoms could be caused by other issues as well, but in my case this was the thing that helped.

You can use the & or && symbols to concatenate a number of commands that you would like to run after each other in the Windows command prompt. The difference between them is that in case of && the next command will only run if the previous one does not end in an error. However, the & will execute the next command, regardless of the outcome of the previous one.

This concatenation can be very useful for example when you are building a project where you would have to build seperate parts in seperate directories.